Lady Dorothy Mills
Lady Dorothy Walopole Mills c.1921
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| Born | Dorothy Rachel Melissa Walpole 11 March 1896 Kensington, London, England, UK |
| Died | 4 December 1959 (aged 63) Brighton, England, UK |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | British |
Lady Dorothy Rachel Melissa Walpole Mills (11 March 1896 – 4 December 1959) was a British novelist and memoirist.
She was born in Kensington, London, the daughter of Robert Horace Walpole, the 5th and final Earl of Orford, and his American-born wife, Countess Louise Melissa Corbin. Her half-sister is Lady Anne Berry (née Walpole), the Anglo-New Zealand horticulturist who founded Rosemoor Garden, Devon.
Lady Dorothy married Captain Arthur F. H. Mills of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry after he was wounded in the First World War in 1916, being presented at the ceremony with a wedding ring made from a bullet that had been surgically removed from his ankle after he was wounded in combat at La Bassée, France. Mills was also an author of both fiction and non-fiction titles. They later divorced in 1933 after he was discovered having an adulterous affair.
Her travel adventures took her to places such as Liberia, the Bosphorous, Arabia, and Venezuela. She is believed to be the first "white woman" to visit Timbuktu, as described in her travelogue The Road to Timbuktu [Duckworth & Co.: London, 1924].
After being severely injured in a car accident in 1929, she recovered and resolved to become the first to discover the source of the Orinoco River in 1931, leading to her book, The Country of the Orinoco (Hutchinson & Co.: London, 1931). While planning a trip to Egypt and the Middle East, her father, Lord Walpole, died in Manurewa, Auckland, New Zealand, on 27 September 1931.
Her father's death allowed Lady Dorothy to access a trust fund left to her in 1918 by her American grandfather, Daniel Chase Corbin, of Spokane, Washington, a millionaire railroad and agricultural tycoon who mistrusted the Earl.
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